Even Young Kids Can Remember Events Years Later

By Katherine Hobson

Do you swear you can remember your older sister opening all your Christmas presents when you were two? And does your family insist you couldn’t possibly recall something that happened at such a young age?

You may be vindicated, as it turns out. A new study published in the journal Child Development finds that about 20% of 46 kids aged 27 to 51 months could recall a “unique event” six years after it occurred. Of the nine kids who remembered, two were under age three when the event happened, report researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago.

“Our new data provide objective evidence that events experienced as young as two years of age may be recalled later in life,” Fiona Jack, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the university, tells the Health Blog via email. Based on studies in adults, researchers had previously talked about the “boundary” of childhood amnesia at around 3 1/2 years of age, though some adults have reported earlier first memories, says Jack.

When the kids in the study were young, they played a game with researchers that was likely to stand out from their everyday experiences: they put a large toy in a hole at the top of a “magic shrinking machine” and turned a handle on the box’s side. When a bell rang, a smaller iteration of the toy popped out of the machine.

The kids were interviewed about the experience 24 hours later, and then again after six years. Interestingly, the ability to remember the game a day later wasn’t related to their ability to recall it years down the line. But the researchers said that kids who actively participated in conversations about the event soon after it happened were more likely to recall it years later than those who didn’t.

Autobiographical memory — the ability to recall episodes from one’s life — is thought to hinge on neurological development as well as the acquisition of language and the development of a perception of self, Jack says. This study suggests that those factors are in place by age two.

But Jack notes that by no means is autobiographical memory fully developed at that age. It will continue to develop during the preschool years, she says. “Long-term recall in our magic shrinking machine experiment was very rare at all ages that we tested, and there is likely a range of factors that contribute to which children will remember which events over long delays,” she says. General intelligence, for example, might play a role.

Jack says that on the basis of kids’ and parents’ reports at the six-year mark, “we are confident” that the magic shrinking machine experience wasn’t a major topic of discussion in the years between interviews.

But she adds that “even if children and parents did talk about the event during the delay, this would still count as long-term recall, although we couldn’t know for sure how much of children’s recall originated in their actual memory of the event, as opposed to subsequent conversations.”